Climbing is fun! Since 2007 the International Federation of Sport Climbing (IFSC) organizes competitive sport climbing events, covering the disciplines lead climbing, speed climbing, and bouldering.
Here, we are focusing on and analyzing the available data on bouldering. Who were and are the strongest competition climbers of their time? Can we discern climbing styles by correlating who climbed similar boulders? Who can climb through qualification, semi-finals, and finals without falling off the wall? Which competitions were the hardest?
Thankfully, the IFSC provides a comprehensive and accessible archive of competition data at https://ifsc.results.info. These data cover all IFSC Bouldering events between 2007 and now, including qualifiation, semi-final as well as final results for World Cups and World Championships. For events after 2007, all participants' attempts to zone and attempts to top are indicated as well as their ranking in the competition.
To automate data acquisition, we wrote a Python Selenium script which is provided in our GitHub repository https://github.com/DavidBreuer/ifsc-analysis. Data are compiled into a comprehensive xlsx file which is used for subsequent analyses. Since climbers' names in the original data showed inconsistent capitalization, we changed to lowercase for simplicity.
Our analyses are similarly performed using Python and published as GitHub pages DavidBreuer.github.io/ifsc-analysis. Among others, our initial analyses cover climber statistics, for individual years as well as overall aggregates, a visualization of similarities in topped boulders between climbers as well as competition statistics.
Please feel free to use these data analyses, contribute to our repository and have fun with our presented insights!
To start with, we complied a table of competition statistics by counting the number and fraction of different results per climber. Here and in the following we we refer to absolute counts (#) and percentages (%) relative to the number of competition participations. Moreoever, we refer to qualification rounds (Q), semi-finals (S), finals (F), podium (P), third (3), second (2), and first places (1), respectively.
Please click on a column header in the table to sort accordingly or use the search bar to filter for specific climbers.
The initial table view is sorted by the number of podium places (#P) which shows Akiyo Noguchi at the clear top with an impressive 60. Alternatively, sorting by the percentage of first places (%1) show that an incredible Janja Gargret won 69% of all IFSC Bouldering competitions she entered.
Since the previous statistics were aggregated across the whole recorded period, we additionally visualize the number of finals (#F)
TODO